Favourite games we played

In last week’s story I talked about some of the games we played at Longwarry State School, No. 2505, during the 50s. That is the 1950s – I am not quite old enough to remember the 1850s.

I forgot “Ring a Ring A Rosy”. Val remembered it well. I hope some of you can take a trip down Memory Lane and see it there.

There were other games we don’t play now, and they keep bobbing up in Swiss-cheese brain. We played the simple game of “chasey,” where whoever was ‘he’ (no ‘she’ even when girls were playing it) simply chased anyone they could catch and ‘tigged’ them. We now call it, I gather, tag.

It meant running, and ducking and weaving, and we now have many primary schools which don’t allow running games, or even ball games, for safety reasons. Pity, that.

A game of similar organisation was ‘Brandy’ where the one with the ball attempted to ‘brand’ another player with it. The victim then took the ball and tried to hit someone else with it. It could sting a bit but no real harm was ever done.

During that wonderful decade, the calm before the storms and the excitement of the 60s, we also had a set of games that were played at school picnics, Sunday school picnics and even unofficial sports days at family functions. Even the Country Party, the Orange Lodge, Legacy, no doubt among others, held picnics.

The footraces were over 100 yards, 220 yards and 440 yards. I once broke 11 seconds for the 100, but that was yards, not metres. Still, it is not a bad boast. It was a novelty to run in a race with lanes marked out on the ground. That was more of a High School thing. The races at State School were always straight and I can’t remember the distances (and the 11 seconds was years later, at Drouin High School).

At those picnic days we had the three classics, the sack race, where everyone hopped into a feed bag and ran with a mixture of jumps, bounds and falls, the egg and spoon race, where one ran holding a dessert spoon (I think) with an egg on it (the egg had to be there at the finish), and what we then called the Siamese race. The name would not be permitted now, but not because it was racist. It was worse. It referred to what we now call “conjoined twins” because two runners would have a leg each tied together, creating a threelegged runner.

There was sometimes a leap frog race where the team bent forward and the runner at the back would have to leap-frog them, not knocking too many over, and then bend over at the head of the line while next ‘last’ runner did the same thing until the line was reached.

We had wheelbarrow races, where one person became a “wheelbarrow” using their hands and arms where a real barrow would have a wheel, and with their partner holding their legs as wheelbarrow handles might be held. This was a hard one!

There was often a contest throwing a cricket ball at a single cricket stump, and I was always amazed when someone succeeded.

Those days were wonderful days out, with sandwiches and cakes and, perhaps best of all, cordial. Even made weak to have enough for everyone, it still tasted wonderful.

The best thing of all, though, was that there were prizes, sometimes of ribbons or cards but often, and much better, there were often cash prizes. If I remember my one big day of athletic dominance - I think it was at Moss Vale Park – I won two shillings and sixpence. I still remember that well but I can’t remember the prize breakdown, I think winners got a shilling, runners-up got sixpence and the third place-getter got threepence. Our amateur status was pretty safe. There were no “participant” ribbons in those days but we all had a power of fun.

Part of the fun was something people younger than me might well find hard to believe, but for Sunday School picnics we travelled in the back of a furniture van, sitting on makeshift benches. It was great fun, all the way from Longwarry to Lang Lang, or out to Picnic Point. It would be interesting to try that now.

The formal school sports were a lot more formal but even there things have changed. At Drouin High School we even had competitive marching, our team trained by Noel Cawthorne, once an army officer and in my time the ‘commercial’ teacher.

We didn’t do that at Longwarry State School.

Another set of games that seem to have disappeared (I’m off on a tangent here, going back to high school) included tunnel ball, where a medicine ball had to be hurried between the spread legs of a row of bent-over children (all boys). The last one would run, with the ball, to the front of the column and sent it down the line again. No, I do not know why those very heavy basketball-ish things were called medicine balls.

The girls played crossball, where the ball was passed in a zig-zag between two lines, again with the final receiver running up the end and starting it all over again. It probably was a great basketball drill but we didn’t play basketball, Th girls played netball but no boys played that.

We didn’t know we were being sexist then – the girls didn’t want to play boy’s games and the reverse held just as true.

I just remembered a game that the girls played back then and that seems to have disappeared, a game that was like cricket in most ways but the bat was a strange and awkward lute-shaped thing. Does anyone still pay Vigoro?

There was also a game something like baseball and softball but in which the ball was kicked from the home plate. I’m struggling to get my ageing memory to come up with the details.

About the only game that comes to mind but has not been mentioned was rounders, a sort of baseball, or softball, played with a small wooden paddle as the bat. The big problem was that the bell would always go with a runner or two still on the bases – and there was the dilemma. One more pitch? Worth the risk? Usually, yes.

My age is a poorly-kept secret but many of you are as old, and I hope you’ve remembered the sunny days and the fun as much as the grazed knees and the bruises. It is worth looking back.